Back on the Block

Back on the Block

By September of '81 Kathy and I separated. I completed and filed our divorce papers that October. Kathy had moved out of the house on Selo Drive in Sunnyvale and my brother Pete and his friend Frank had moved in. I now felt I was free to move around the world again – re-establish a more normal and enjoyable social life. I had met a few women and even went on a date, but nothing came of it. Pete and I, along with some friends would frequent a few clubs and bars but I was never very good at meeting women at those venues and as a result the more common way for me to meet women was through work. There were women to meet at Tymshare, where I worked. The ones I knew mostly knew me as a married man. It wasn't like I was going to hold a press conference to announce my new status and I didn't see how I could comfortably fit in something like “Oh by the way, I am now available.” into a casual conversation. I am not the forward type. In fact, I'm more the opposite.

That fall the Admin Department at Tymshare threw a holiday party in their office area. The party started up in the late afternoon. Since I maintained and wrote programs for their department I was invited. Like most organizations of that time the Admin Department's makeup was largely of the female gender so the gender ratio of the party was like 4 to 1, my gender being on the one side. I viewed being a member of this particular minority as an advantage, at least for me being a heterosexual man and now unattached. As the party wore on two women, Jackie and Karen, sort of cornered me and we were talking and joking around a bit. I knew Jackie some, but I didn't know Karen. She had played a few times with the company co-ed softball team that I had joined that fall but I never had the occasion to talk with her prior to this party. I was enjoying the attention when the department head came over and asked Karen to go fetch something. Karen looked over at me and grabbed my hand and said “Come with me”. The item we were fetching was on a different floor and so Karen dragged me to the elevator. We got in and the door closed. Karen then stepped in front of me and planted a big kiss right on my mouth. Now I don't remember what we were getting or where it was, but as they say, it's about the journey, not the destination. We eventually did get to the destination, picked up what we came for, returned the way we came, and in the words of my favorite Zen master, Yogi Berra, in the elevator it was “deja vu” all over again. It was a short but memorable jaunt. As the party started to wind down. Karen along with others, including myself, stayed to help clean up. At the end I walked Karen to her car in the parking lot. Once we got to Karen's car we re-enacted the elevator scene one more time and made a date for the coming Friday night.

The next day when I got to work there was an unsigned note on my desk with the question “Aren't you married?” I later saw Karen in the hallway and I asked her if she had left anything on my desk? She looked at me oddly and said “No. I've never even been over to your cubicle.” Friday came and I knocked on the door of Karen's apartment. She promptly answered and invited me in. She asked me to sit down. She then said someone had told her I was married and wanted to know if that was true. I did my best “George Washington” saying “Well yes, it's technically true, I am, but I am also in the process of getting a divorce. She said well then since I was still married any extracurricular activity that evening would be limited to kissing only.

We went on our date and we had a good time but we did not make plans for a second one. I was interested, and I thought she was too, but it was going to be at least 4 months before my divorce would become final. I mean we were already at first base before our date. I wasn't 16 anymore and while I appreciated being on first base with Karen, I know that once I've hung out on first for awhile I am pretty much interested in visiting those other bases as well. There's nothing wrong with first base but spending 4 months or so stranded there seemed to me like an awfully long time. I was not sure how I wanted to proceed.

The next week Karen called me at home and said she was revoking the “married limits” and said she wanted to see me again. I don't know if she checked me out to confirm I was telling her the truth about the divorce or if it was my overwhelming charm and animal magnetism that changed things but I was not about to asked any questions. She asked me over for dinner at her place the next night. She asked what I liked to eat. I told her I was basically a vegetarian plus I didn't do dairy, but I'd make do with whatever she fixed. Probably not the best answer. Karen then suggested maybe I should just come over after dinner for dessert and coffee. I am not much of a dessert person and at that time I hardly ever drank coffee but this time I kept it to myself as my thoughts were more about the possibility of getting off first base. So I just replied “Great!”. Karen said “See you at eight.”

Karen grew up in an area that some would call “the other side of the tracks” It was a lower working class neighborhood. In her family, college was never part of the equation. Her Dad was not in the picture. Her Mom had a boyfriend who mostly stayed at her house. Karen's sister also lived there. She was tall and blond. Karen was reluctant to introduce me to her for quite awhile. She explained that her sister would try to steal her boyfriends from her if she liked them and evidently she had had great success in the past. When I finally met this notorious sister I understood. She was both attractive and available, but I managed to resist becoming one of Karen's sister's success stories.

Karen was quite uninhibited. She was curious and up for trying new things. She'd been around the block and it was a big block. She had done many things, a few of which were things I never even thought of. She had one previous serious relationship that was on and off again for a number of years but other than that she “played the field” and she “played it” with gusto. On the surface it seemed we were a little bit of a mismatch. I'd always been, well for the most part pretty traditional in my relationships as well as monogamous. But we got along very well. I was a little different in the way I thought about “physical” relationships compared to her and many of her other male friends but she seemed to like that about me. I liked her free spirit and her non-judgmental ways.

I eventually found out who left that note on my desk. It was another woman from the Admin Department. Maybe she was offended by my leaving the party with Karen since I was married, but it seemed she may have had designs on me for herself based on what Jackie (the same Jackie mentioned above) told me later. It was too late now, I was already getting involved with Karen and as I alluded to above, I seem to only get interested in one woman at a time. I didn't ask, but Karen limited all her extracurricular activities to just me once we started seeing each other regularly. Our relationship would last for the better part of a year. At that point, Karen decided that she wanted a more permanent relationship as in she wanted to get married. I'd been down that road two times already and the second just recently. I was not ready or wanting to head that way again. We had a number of long talks with the result being that Karen decided she needed to move on. So while we remained friends and sometimes still did stuff together we essentially broke up.